Use of telemedicine can have a significant impact on individual health and can therefore favorably impact longevity. The value to the economy for these improvements in life expectancy is about as large as the value of all other consumption goods and services combined. In this regard, certain health services can be greatly enhanced via telemedicine. For example, home health services are receiving a great deal of attention and investment in many countries around the world. Telemedicine technologies enable home health providers to redefine patient treatment plans, as they are able to increase virtual patient visits through the elimination of a significant percentage of travel to patients' homes. In addition, in many situation outpatient monitoring allows for hospitalizations prediction, which results in actions leading to avoiding such expensive procedures. Further, access to quality, state of the art health care in underserved areas, such as rural communities, is one of the most important promised benefits of telemedicine. Rural residents are not second-class citizens; they deserve access to health care services that those in metropolitan areas enjoy.
An example of popular telemedicine applications are long-term, outpatient arrhythmia diagnostic systems, where patients are monitored for several weeks, while staying at home or carrying their normal lives. These systems utilize a concept of transmitting short ECG fragments, when an important cardiac event occurs. In more obsolete applications, the event transmissions are manually triggered by the patients, while most recent applications use intelligent algorithms, operating in real-time, which based on automatically detected events, trigger the transmissions. Both of the above applications can be viewed as so-called ‘event systems’, because they transmit only short ECG fragments, representing limited events only. Diagnostic reports from such systems usually contain limited, in terms of statistical representation, information describing the normal and abnormal heart rhythm and produce qualitative rather than quantitative results. On the contrary, the so called ‘Hotter systems’, popular applications for short term (usually 24 hours or 48 hours) arrhythmia diagnostics, allow for reviewing the entire full-disclosure ECG signal and verifying classification results for each heart beat, hence they are capable of producing qualitative and comprehensive statistical reports, with each heart beat counted and classified. The ‘Holler systems’, however, are offline applications, where the ECG signal is stored by ‘Holter recorders’ carried by the patients, and after the diagnostic session is completed, the recorders are returned to a physician/specialist for data download and automated analysis and post-processing.
Thus, a need exists in the telemedicine field for outpatient monitoring systems and methods allowing for generating more quantitative analysis results.